Eels, the project of Los Angeles-based songwriter Mark Oliver Everett, worked out a storytelling style that was both humble and sophisticated on Beautiful Freak (1996), locating his tone and arrangements somewhere between Beck and the Flaming Lips. Electro-Shock Blues (1998), a bleak concept album and a moving requiem for friends who died, upped the ante by adopting Tom Waits' skewed orchestral arrangements and topping Neil Young's manic depression. By exploiting the disorienting sonic events generated by keyboards, samplers and turntables, and by integrating jazz and neoclassical motifs, Everett coined a solemn, disturbing, jarring form of folk music.
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Daisies Of The Galaxy (Dreamworks, 2000) leaves behind
Electro-Shock Blues' gloom but suffers from the success syndrome.
Everett's pop talent is wasted in lame ballads that alternatively recall
REM (Flyswatter, I Like Birds)
and U2 (Jeannie's Diary, Grace Kelly Blues).
The echo of their masterpiece's excruciating depression still hovers over
Mr E's Beautiful Blues,
Grace Kelly Blues and The Sound Of Fear, but this time the
music is far less shocking.

Souljacker (Geffen, 2001 - Dreamworks, 2002) keeps the band in that limbo of non-essential but non-despicable rock, and adds a philosophical dimension to the music.
The album's swing from hard-rock (Dog Faced Boy) and
boogie (Souljacker Part One) and rockabilly (Dog Faced Boy)
to ballad (Fresh Feeling) and exotica (That's Not Really Funny)
does not bode well for the future of the band,
that seems incapable of re-attaining the magic of their Blues
masterpiece. Friendly Ghost and Bus Stop Boxer are carefully
crafted songs but hardly unique
(not to mention the Beck-style samples of Jungle Telegraph).
This is certainly their most upbeat album yet, and the most diverse, but not
necessarily the most sincere and the most consistent.

I Am The Messiah (Spinart, 2003) is a parallel project by
Mark Everett, disguised under the moniker Mc Honky. The album is a collage
of found sounds, sound effects and tender melodies.

Returning to the Eels, Everett displayed a lighter, more casual tone.
Shootenanny (Dreamworks, 2003) feels more like a collection of notes
than a profound concept.
Featuring Lisa Germano, this is Eels' most atmospheric album yet.
He has relented the tension but increased the magic.
There is precious little invention
(All In A Days Work recycles blues and soul cliches, and
Restraining Order Blues, Lone Wolf , Agony and
Numbered Days subscribe to a generic pensive mood, like outtakes
from Electro-Shock Blues), but his songs have never sounded so
"complete", finished, irrevocable. It is not a coincidence that they also
sound poppier, although their melodies are hardly Beatles-ian.
Saturday Morning (replete with falsetto chorus),
Love of the Loveless, Dirty Girl, and the standout, Wrong About Bobby, are emotionally stable and structurally solid, as if one aspect
of the music strived to convey the quality of the other.

After three relatively minor Eels releases,
Mark Everett poured his entire philosophy and every musical skill he has honed
over the years into the Eels' double-CD 33-song monolith
Blinking Lights And Other Revelations (Vagrant, 2005),
an autobiographical concept,
inspired by Bergman's film "Wild Strawberries",
reportedly eight years in the making,
that follows his own life from birth till "stardom".
His self-analysis is largely a soliloquy that does not affect the music,
which is, in turn, meticulously crafted.
Theme From Blinking Lights, that opens the proceedings with Everett
humming a Christmas-style singalong over simple guitar and xylophone patterns,
Trouble With Dreams, a breezy pop melody with a soaring organ and a rhythm of xylophone that sounds like a ticking clock,
Mother Mary, that generates a jazzy-reggae rhythm from bicycle noise and then layers a psychedelic refrain on a bluesy organ,
Going Fetal, a catchy joyful ditty a` la Tommy Roe that fuses stereotypes of Mersey-beat, surf music and early garage-rock,
Checkout Blues, a serving of orchestral easy-listening,
Old Shit New Shit, with ringing guitar, theremin-like keyboards and loud and upbeat Phil Spector-ian production,
Hey Man, a fast-paced rigmarole,
If You See Natalie, with echoes of John Lennon's Imagine,
Railroad Man, an old-fashioned country-rock,
Losing Streak, a pop clockwork at a scherzo tempo (Cars-like keyboards staccato, brass-like fanfare, ska beat, soaring refrain)
radiate humanity at its most basic and universal.
This core quality lasts till the end, slowly mutating into something less
personal and more universal, less matter-of-factual and more meaningful,
all the way till
the sentimental piano dirge The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight
and the epic neoclassical finale of
Things The Grandchildren Should Know, an anthem for the everyman.
Nonetheless, Everett sounds more comfortable when he captures childhood than
than adulthood.
A sense of magic exudes from
From Which I Came, 50 seconds of cello drones and guitar reverbs lead to a catchy psychedelic melody drenched in gospel-y organ and
Duane Eddy-ian twang,
and
Blinking Lights For Me, a
Donovan-ian fairy tale.
A disturbing existential feeling is never too far from the main path, though.
Besides the chamber spiritual Understanding Salesman
and the chamber lied Dust of Ages (a Pachelbel-style adagio with Everett
whispering over floating strings and organ), two arresting pieces that defy
psychoanalysis,
several songs throughout the album evoke the ghost of
Tom Waits:
the slow, sloppy, jazzy Son Of A Bitch,
the melancholy piano ballad Suicide Life,
and Last Time We Spoke (perhaps one too many Waits impersonations
As the mood changes from youthful exuberance to mature regret, Everett pens
the long pensive
I'm Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart
for guitars and xylophone,
and
the solemn elegy to urban loneliness
of Whatever Happened To Soy Bomb
for guitar and cello.
There are few moments of high drama. The percussive, demonic
The Other Shoe is the exception, not the rule.
The brief instrumental interludes
(the lugubrious and haunting Marie Floating Over The Backyard for piano
and wordless chanting,
the doleful waltz of Bride of Theme From Blinking Lights,
God's Silence) are sometimes
more meaningful than the lyrics: they too radiate the same energy, just more
of it, without the greenhouse effect of the poetic scaffolding.
Everett interprets music as calligraphy.
On the downside, one can detect the perverse influence of the Apples In Stereo school of baroque pop, and occasionally even the perverse influence of the Beatles' White Album.
On the other hand, there is no question that Everett sings very confident
in his ability to modulate a monotonous discourse into graceful, colorful,
mesmerizing calligraphy. In a sense, that is the very reason that he does
what he does on this album. He sings about himself being able to sing about
himself, and turns an autobiography into a celebration of his qualities,
and, indirectly, of music itself.
Everett is one of the greatest living songwriters, and he knows it.
This album stands not so much as a manifestation of this greatness, but of
him being aware of it.

Everett used a chamber ensemble to revisit his classics on
Eels With Strings (Vagrant, 2006).

Meet the Eels (2008) is a career anthology.
Useless Trinkets (2008) is a collection of rarities.

The concept album
Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire (Vagrant, 2009) is almost the
alter-ego of
Blinking Lights And Other Revelations: a savage fresco of human
passion.
The dominant style is garage-rock
(Prizefighter, Fresh Blood, Liliac Breeze, What's a Fella Gotta Do,
Tremendous Dynamite)
although the Eels can still craft bouncy pop (Beginner's Luck, In My Dreams) and
Everett at this stage
can't resist the modest acoustic folk litany (That Look You Give That Guy, The Longing,
My Timing Is Off, Ordinary Man).

End Times (2010) is a concept about Everett's divorce, a more tragic
version of Broken Toy Shop (1993), a depressing monologue in a skeletal
albeit dignified
style (Little Bird, In My Younger Days, On My Feet) whose
main drawback is that it is consistently too straightforward to be also art
(with the minor exceptions of the
rocking Gone Man and the chamber-folk of A Line in the Dirt).
This album continued the slide into a charming state of melancholy that had accelerated
with Hombre Lobo.
While more literate than either, Everett
doesn't radiate the solemn epos of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
and doesn't plunge into the apocalyptic bleakness of Neil Young's
Tonight't the Night: he simply drifts into an increasingly
placid inner world.

Tomorrow Morning (2010) closed the trilogy of sorts begun with
Hombre Lobo and balanced the suicidal mood of the previous album with
a more virile stand and a lot more stylistic variety.
The bouncy, syncopated, electronic funk-rock Baby Loves Me,
the grand string-bathed Broadway-ish aria of I'm A Hummingbird,
the simple country-rock I Like the Way This Is Going
and especially the jubilant stomping gospel of Looking Up
reassured his audience that he was still a musician, after all.